Mike Hamer lives in Zürich, Switzerland, where he studies and researches robotics and computer learning at the ETH. Coming from a background of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mike is primarily focused on the control and software aspects of robotics, and has a particular interest in heterogeneous swarms, robot-human swarms, and distributed learning.

Aisoy, a spanish robotics startup, is motivated by the goal of building intelligent, personal, “social” robots, which make our lives easier and funnier. Their robot, the Aisoy1, is their first step towards achieving this vision. Robohub recently caught up with the team, to talk about social robotics, the Aisoy1, and the startup culture in Spain.

The Girls of Steel – a competitive FIRST team located in Pittsburg, PA – is on a mission to draw more young women into engineering. We’ve already heard what it’s like to be part of an all-girls robotics team, we now catch up with the team’s mentors, Theresa Richards and George Kantor, to hear about their roles in inspiring and mentoring the team. Here’s what they have to say …

Girls of Steel at the 2013 FIRST Championships. Photo credit: Walt Urbina.

The Girls of Steel – a competitive FIRST team located in Pittsburg, PA – is on a mission to draw more young women into engineering. We asked team members Mackenzie Ferris (16), Sylvie Lee (16), Molly Urbina (15), Lynn Urbina (17), and Becca Volk (15) to give us the inside scoop of what it’s like to be part of an all-girls robotics team. Here’s what they have to say …

Since posting the call for contributions in August, 2013, I was contacted by many enthusiastic and inspiring individuals who were interested in sharing their experience with budding roboticists.

Starting on September 23rd 2013, Robohub’s focus on robotics education featured original articles and tutorials from educators, students, hobbyists and expert roboticists, with the goal of putting a spotlight on robotics education, and to inspiring budding roboticists of all ages to take the next step in their robotics education.

In light of the popularity of his AR.Drone tutorials, we have invited Robohub contributor Mike Hamer to act as Guest Editor for our next focus series “Getting Started in Robotics.”

Like many children who show an early interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), my childhood years were spent constructing Lego masterpieces and deconstructing household electronics.

A new video released today by researchers from the Flying Machine Arena shows how a quadrocopter is able to learn from prior experience to improve future performance.

This new research is an extension of results published last year by the same group, which show how quadrocopters can learn to fly high-performance slalom courses (video).

Much like humans learn through repetition and practice, the quadrocopter repeatedly flies the slalom course, records any errors made and then tries to compensate for these errors during the next attempt.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the Robot Dragonfly from TechJect. Developed over four years by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology for the US Air Force, the researchers are now investigating commercial and consumer opportunities through their recently released campaign on the crowd-funding website, IndieGoGo.

As part of the IM-CLeVeR project, the IDSIA robotics laboratory recently released a video-overview of their work on the technologies, architectures and algorithms required to give an iCub robot more human-like abilities. This includes the ability to reason about and manipulate its local environment, and in the process, to acquire new skills that can be applied to future problems.